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Tuesday, February 12, 2013

When making small talk with people I am
unlikely to see again, I often waffle, obfuscate, or even lie about my
life. “I'm a housewife.” “I'm a temp.” “I'm between jobs
right now.” “I'm a chemical engineer. At a box factory. Oh,
specialty boxes. Very specialized actually. Uh... polymerization.
Polymerized coatings. Cardboard polymerization. Well it has to do
with structural variables and a proprietary folding algorithm, and,
um, would you excuse me?”

When I must genuinely introduce myself,
I generally stall as much as possible, but when asked directly about
what I “do,” I say that I am a dance teacher, or if I think the
company I'm in will not find it too pompous, a “dance artist.”
Then I equivocate some more, until the dreaded revelation can no longer
be put off. “I'm a belly dancer.”

I can show you contemporary examples of this sort of thing too, by the way, but I don't want to put anyone on the spot.

And then things spin into apology and
meaninglessness. “But I'm really serious. Well, no, actually I'm
not exactly a 'professional dancer,' because I do more theatrical work, and it's not lucrative at all. I don't really do the kind of
restaurant and party dancing that's commercially viable. Oh no, I don't mean
that I do cultural presentations or theatrical folklore. I'm really
not very authentic, although I hate to say that, because it
sounds bad, right? Oh, sure, tribal fusion is amazing and very
serious, but I don't do that either. I do my own fusion, I'm artistic, but I
don't like to say that because when you hear 'fusion' or 'creative' or 'so-and-so does her own unique style' that just sounds inherently
terrible to me. And I'm not terrible. I'm really very good. I'm you know, a
really good dancer who happens to be a belly dancer. But, like, a
good dancer. I'm extremely technical. I sort of take it to a serious
place where it's not so constrained by its traditional context or
conceptual framework. But it's not technical and 'experimental' like
stark and awful and soulless... I'm still making dance that's about
beauty but taking it really seriously, being really serious not only
about clean lines but about the musicality and the emotional
expression and trying to elevate it to an artistic or even spiritual
realm...”

Here's the short version that I have
not yet adapted to easy conversational patter: I work in a medium
dedicated to the viewer's sensual gratification, but I do not pander,
and I am deeply dismayed when I am lumped in with those who do; I
work in a medium with low barriers to entry but I have uncompromising
standards of excellence for my own work, and I am deeply dismayed by
the preponderance of people who seem unable to tell the difference.

It isn't even that I find the
meretricious gambolings of my less-invested, uh, “colleagues” to
be that objectionable. Belly dance is meant to appeal to the senses, I don't apologize for its sensual nature, and I don't apologize for those who focus more narrowly on one sensual expression than another. If your primary motivation is to get attention with a skimpy outfit and you want to gracelessly flail in it, I admire your lack
of self-consciousness. If doing some nonspecific wiggling enhances
your self-esteem or enriches your inner fantasy life, go, sister, go.
If you make more money at the the strip club with an I
Dream of Jeannie act, I congratulate you on having found a
competitive advantage in a difficult line of work. Even if your intentions are high-minded but you're really just not a very good dancer, I don't want to be a judgmental jerk. Not everyone's good at everything.

I stumble over the words “I am a
belly dancer” because it weighs on my heart to throw my pearls
before swine. I consider my work worthy of respect, so I am very
tired of raised eyebrows, leers, uncomfortable silences, flustered
attempts to not appear closed-minded, and weird uses of “folk
dancer” or “empowerment” construed as polite euphemisms. Which isn't to
say that everyone's rude or poorly informed. But I don't think
I've ever met anyone whose first impression wasn't colored by the
assumption of some inherent frivolousness or inconsequentiality.

And I get it. I understand that, when
I identify myself as a belly dancer, all you can do is evaluate the
nature of my work, not the work itself. There's no reason why you
would arrive at the conclusion that I am creative, thoughtful,
meticulous, and highly skilled; that my dances are sophisticated
compositions, not a pretense for displays of skin; that my material
isn't a genre-bound rehash that depends on borrowed interest from
tired stereotypes; that only by the most extreme standards would my
costuming be considered salacious or would my movements be considered
obscene or vulgar; that my dance aims not to provoke lust, but to
charm, to fascinate, to delight.

This is why I have spent the last ten
years bending over backwards (in many cases literally), trying to be
seen, first and foremost, as an artist. This is why my “dance
name” is my name: Autumn Ward. As a concession to befuddled
speakers of English as a foreign language, I have sometimes Arabized
“Autumn” to “Fatima” (get it? F-Autumn-a?) or conflated my
initial, middle name, and surname, “A. Leah Ward” to “Alea al
Warda,” but I've never done work that I didn't want full credit
for, or that would be enhanced by being left open to
one-dimensionalization. This is why I make every dance look
different from the last one I created, why I spend so much time on
each new piece, and can only show perhaps three new dances in a good
year, and in a difficult year complete none. This is why I have a
blog dedicated to the critical analysis of each of my YouTube videos.
With every entry, I cringe at what I know might seem to be ridiculous
self-importance, but I see that people remain oblivious to most of
what I am doing until I explicitly spell it out. This is why I am
increasingly reluctant to put on a bedleh, the traditional 2-piece
bra-and-belt bellydance costume, and why I bristle at
characterizations of my style as “cabaret.”

And this is why I've been in the habit
of trying to make every posed photo an opportunity to portray myself
as someone with dance training, showcasing, if nothing else, my
flexibility, the carriage of my arms or the lift of my alignment.

I am bending over backwards for you, figuratively and literally, trying to be seen first and foremost as an artist.

When I see photos of belly dancers with their hands in their hair or
lounging on a carpet I have a knee-jerk reaction of being NOT
impressed. Certainly the publicity posters of ballet and modern
companies never feature their stars luxuriously
reclining—they are shown gloriously athletically in motion. By
comparison, belly dancers appear to be distinguished primarily as
pretty ladies who are also owners/wearers of pretty costumes. Some
accomplishment.

What accomplishment is on display here? Which dancer's portrait commands respect for her dancing? At left, Linda Celeste Sims, at right, Mia Leimkuhler.

At least that's been my attitude about
such photos recently.

But here's the thing: I like pretty
costumes and pretty pictures of pretty ladies as much as anyone. And
I particularly like lush images that show a softer aesthetic:
classically-styled pinups, golden age Hollywood and silent film
stills, the “Oriental” dancers and chorus girls of the 19th
century, fantasy art, fairy tale illustrations, Mucha, Beardsley,
Alma-Tadema, Waterhouse, Parrish, John R. Neill.... I cherish these
images. They inspire and transport me. In fact, they affect me
exactly as I hope to affect others through dance: with charm,
fascination, delight.

And I appreciate that these images,
like my dance, are works of creativity, thoughtfulness, and skill.
With this in mind, it becomes obvious to me that a beautiful photo of
a reclining dancer (or, for that matter, a nondancer in a dance
costume) is an accomplishment of styling, design, vision, and craft,
representing the real investment of a model and photographer, and
whatever support staff they have (or may not have) behind them.

Only when viewed through a filter of
snobbery is a model's prettiness, a quality that generally extends
far beyond her genetics, not an accomplishment in and of itself.
Posing, like dancing, is a real skill of intelligent physicality.
What in the old days they rightly called the “artfulness” of
one's appearance, the skillful and self-expressive creation of allure or smart style, is a talent
clearly not given to all. And, speaking as someone who is not
naturally slim, is not as young as she once was, and who owes her
figure, skin, hair, and teeth at least as much to a lifetime of
careful and disciplined choices and habits as to luck, I very well
know that it takes real work to create and maintain an attractive
face and body. These accomplishments are seldom vaunted or
praised—our culture, while it rewards beauty, sneers at vanity—but
I have no reservations about acknowledging their value.

Photographs can only hint at
coordination, musicality, and fluidity—the qualities on which even
the liveliest and boldest styles of belly dance rely. Belly
dancers waver, circle, spiral, and oscillate. Photos can no more
capture these energies than a picture of a candle can capture the
flame's flicker. The movement vocabulary of belly dance is
contained, never creating the leg extensions and jumps that are the
Kodak moments of Western dance. Softer styles do not “explode” on
stage, but instead are virtuoso displays of subtlety. These are
features, not bugs.

So what is the problem with
sensually-posed belly dance photo portraiture? I have to conclude
that the only problem is my double standard, that I am too wound up
in my personal crusade, and that I'm ready to give it a rest. I can
easily do what I ask of others, think critically, and see that the
choice to primarily communicate sensuality is not in any way a
shortcoming but its own legitimate expression. While some
contemporary costuming trends are not to my taste, and some
dancers/models lack artfulness, these are failures of content, not
medium.

Offering someone the pleasure of
looking at a beautiful image is not really so different from offering
them the pleasure of watching a beautiful dance. Perhaps a
newcomer runs the risk of being thought not a very good dancer if her
pictures emphasize something other than her dance training, but those
who jump to this conclusion are unlikely to be belly dance
aficionados. Belly dance photos are not a job interview at the
bank: to show sensuality is not unseemly. The fact is that
beautiful images are accomplishments of joy, comfort, inspiration,
and cheer. They lifts our hearts, soothe our spirits, and fire our
imaginations.

Despite the value I place on work,
despite the recognition I seek for my work, there's nothing appealing
to me about evaluating the success of belly dance through the dour lens of
a Protestant work ethic. Belly dance, above all else, is an
accomplishment of mystery. Of all the reasons to dance, I can think of none
more noble than undertaking belly dance as an act of re-enchanting
the world.

Maybe it's time for me to get back in a
bedleh. Maybe it's time for me to celebrate sensuality on its own terms and merits. I'm going to assume that at this point, if you haven't formed an opinion about my accomplishments in dance, new photos won't sway your opinion one way or the other no matter how they are posed. The world can never have too many pretty pictures of pretty ladies.

(Did I really just work so hard on an essay about working hard to justify posting a picture of myself not working hard? Oh yes I did. The irony is not lost on me.)

Sunday, February 10, 2013

What is an example of a conceptual influence from outside
belly dance? Any concept inspiration from any other area of arts or
life... [My segment begins at 5:23]

[A transcript of my segment follows below.]There is a book I want to mention, a work of popular psychology, called
the Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine Aron, and her name is spelled
A-R-O-N. In this book, Dr. Aron describes High Sensitivity as a
relatively common personality trait—it's about 15-20% of people—and she
discusses ways that people who have this trait can identify it in
themselves and learn to use it constructively and regard it as an asset.
When I first found out about this idea about this highly sensitive
population, right away for me I made a connection to belly dance. [I
suspect that a disproportionate number of people involved in belly dance
have this kind of high sensitivity. ] Our dance is very emotional, very
expressive, but subtle—very nuanced. Over and over again we use and we
hear this phrase “poetry in motion”... We are not living in poetic
times, so to have this poetic impulse, this interest in poetic movement,
I think reveals a lot about the kinds of people who are drawn to this
dance form.

Or maybe it just reveals a lot about me, but
cultivating an appreciation for my sensitivity has been very valuable to
me, and it definitely affects the way that I construct dances. As I
said, we are not living in poetic times. If you look at the way we
interact with technology, the way our TV and our movies have this fast
short-attenion-span camera work and quick editing, the way our food and
our medicine are industrialized, I think it's very easy to become
accustomed to this superficial way of just passively skating along. You
know, people say that this is why there's so much interest right now in
zombies in popular culture, because we intuitively have this sense that
there's a dark side to this quick-fix gratification, that it can degrade
us. But belly dance, I think, can be an antidote to that. It has this
amazing capacity to be a vehicle for poetic expression, poetic
experience. It can be a doorway into the extraordinary, into this
beautiful, tender, transcendent, other realm of experience. Or it
doesn't have to be profound, it can also just be simple and happy and
fun and joyful, but it always has, or, always has the potential to have,
this extraordinary romantic quality. Working with this in
mind—understanding and engaging with this poetic aspect of belly dance, I
think is.. has [made] a big contribution to why my dances look the way
that they do, why they have this unique look. It sounds trite to talk
about heart and soul, but I don't know how else to describe it. I am
dancing from my heart, through the whole thing. From the dreaming up of
the ideas to the sequencing together of the choreography to the actual
dancing, the actual performance. Even in the way that I kinesthetically
click in, in the way that I align my body... I dance from my heart.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Filmed January 2013. I know many of the readers of this blog are outside of the US. My
international fans continue to dazzle and humble me with their foreign language skills—most of you speak English better than I
do—but for those who do better reading than listening or who just
want to plug the whole thing into the google translator, I've also included a transcript.

What prompts the evolution of your
dance style?
[My segment begins at 1:20].

Well, over the past few years I've been
very fortunate in that I've had several opportunities to do
nontraditional work in video and theatrical settings, so on the one
hand I have been trying new things like crazy, but at the core of how
I'm dancing, I'm not actually sure that my style has evolved that
much. In terms of pure aesthetic, I think there's a distinct
signature to the way that I move that really has stayed quite
consistent across everything that I've done. I've always been very
invested in training for precision, and taking care to articulate
through as full of a range of motion as possible. So in all my
dances no matter what the conceptual idea is, the technical qualities
I think are always very consistent—there's a basic clean supple
look that's always there.

If anything has changed, though, beyond
style and technique, I think it is probably that the presence of my
personality in my dances is more apparent now than maybe it was...
What I have always loved about belly dance is its softness and
subtlety, but I used to really struggle with the fact that for many
audiences, at least Western audiences, in nightclub and restaurant
settings, a lot of that subtlety is totally lost. So, as a result I
started focusing more on prop work, fast finger cymbals, adding
high-energy and acrobatic elements into my dancing... Which was a good
development, to a point, because it really increased my technical
range, but it was maybe not the most artistically honest direction to
take my career. I'm not a party person. I don't have an
uproarious personality. So it was not a good choice for me to focus on these
loud dances. Now I'm very much back to lyrical work, still
using some of the flashier moves, but for texture, where it's
contextually called for, not with the same kind of shock-and-awe,
attention-demanding, approval-seeking motivation that maybe was
there once.

I think we all have a tendency to
devalue our natural gifts, and it was incredibly useful for me to
realize, and to remind myself, that anyone can do splits and
backbends and... Not anyone. Other dancers, athletically elite
dancers—can do these tricks and these gimmicks—but there's really
no one else who can create work that is like mine in terms of
lyricism, intricacy, details, delicacy. These [qualities] are... That's where
my passion is. That's what I take pride in, that's what I want to
be known for, and that is the creative imprint that I want on my
work. So again it's not really an evolution because I feel like my
career sort of went in a big loop and left me back doing the same
things that I always wanted to do when I started out, except
hopefully now with a little more polish. But, what is behind that I
guess is just the desire to be honest, and perhaps having greater
courage to be honest. I don't... I won't spend time on projects
unless they genuinely appeal to my artistic sensibilities. Which
sometimes are a little different from maybe what's in the
mainstream.

About Me

I’m a dancer, choreographer, class instructor, and traveling workshop presenter, specializing in artistic belly dance. My work on appears on the DVD Beautiful Technique from Step One as well as several other instructional, reference, and performance programs. My full dance bio is here.